It’s our first glimpse of one of the weirdest spectacles in the universe: Astronomers released humanity’s first image of a black hole Wednesday Apr 10, 2019.
The picture reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the “nearby” Virgo galaxy cluster. It looked like a flaming orange, yellow and black ring.
OK, but how does it relate to Salesforce???
Don’t worry, I don’t want to delve into the details about the Blackhole information paradox. To make a long story short, it highlights two seemingly contradictory features of black holes:
- From Einstein general theory of relativity, everything that falls into a black hole is lost and never comes back
- From quantum mechanics, information should never disappear…
Starting to see my point about Salesforce?
You’re sending a lot of data into Salesforce, but it never comes back!
The root causes of this problem is that times have changed forever:
- Your prospects and customers have access to unlimited sources of information about your company, your products, your competitors…
- Marketing and Sales should more than ever be aligned and collaborate seamlessly in a SMarketing approach
- Pre-sales process involves more and more people across departments: Legal, Operations, Marketing…
But how to effectively collaborate across departments when your CRM creates a sealed border between your sales team and the rest of your organization?
The Salesforce attempt to mitigate this issue… Chatter.
Chatter just utterly failed
- Chatter is asynchronous just like emails and does not bring real-time conversation needed to match the current speed of business
- Chatter is difficult to use across devices and the Salesforce1 mobile app UX is utterly cluttered
- Chatter is complex to collaborate with people outside the sales team, resulting in difficulties to align teams collaboration across the organization
- Chatter lacks integrations. Not all services can be Integrated into your feed, especially marketing tools, ERP, Line of Business applications, etc…
The results:
- Most sales teams simply don’t use it or use it improperly
- Executives are often not involved in conversations and important deals information, relying on emails for feedback or alerts
- Other departments are not involved or just don’t have the necessary Salesforce / Chatter licenses
7 reasons why Microsoft Teams is the new Chatter for Sales Teams!
Microsoft Teams is a natural evolution to Chatter. It was built from the ground to be used across every department in a company, not just in sales. For that reason, Microsoft Teams shines in all the areas where Chatter falls short for sales teams.
1. Microsoft Teams Is Real-Time (Instead of Asynchronous)
Within companies (and especially during the workday) people treat Microsoft Teams messages a lot like text messages, which are seen and opened almost instantaneously. In fact, most of the text messages are read within 2 minutes!
That’s as real-time as it gets.
Compared to email, which might get a response in a day or two, or Chatter, which might get a response sometime next week (if ever…)
2. Microsoft Teams Works Great from Anywhere on Any Device
Especially useful for outside sales, Microsoft Teams works beautifully across any modern device. smartphone, tablet, Mac, PC, all the channels and messages are there and are easy to see and respond to.
And yes, your phone system can be integrated too! This is ideal for any sales team – whether working in-house, remote, or in-the-field.
3. Microsoft Teams integrates all your sales and marketing apps you’re already using in one feed
Thanks to its embedded app store, Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork. You can integrate easily in minutes all your existing sales, marketing and customer support tools:
For instance, you want to optimize your teamwork by collectively managing your external communications directly in Microsoft Teams, across multiple channels (email, Live Chat, Twitter, Facebook…), just bring MailClark to your sales channels!
4. Sell as a team, at the speed of business!
Use teams for improved visibility between sales, marketing, product, and support so you’re working towards the same goals:
- Share wins and important information across the company
- Grow your workspace’s collective knowledge in teams and organize them to keep conversations focused
- Automatically get sales data and alerts in channels
5. Microsoft Teams Is Cheaper for People Outside Your Sales Team
Perhaps best of all, Microsoft Teams is usually adopted across a company, not just in Sales. This is key for modern Account-Based Collaboration, which works best when it includes people with unique perspectives from outside the sales staff, often people who don’t have Salesforce licenses (A Chatter-only license costs around $15 per month…).
And as we discussed earlier, it’s not easy for someone who doesn’t use Salesforce every day to even use Chatter.
Microsoft Teams, by contrast, is either free (up to 300 users), or included in any Office 365 subscription plans.
6. Microsoft Teams Can Organize Conversations by Accounts and Opportunities
Teams are ideally designed to organize conversations around a sales account, and team’s channels are ideal to collaborate on leads and opportunities.
Instead of finding a record in Salesforce, then talking about it using Chatter, people are just using teams and channels for the account and its opportunities to keep their conversations organized.
7. Microsoft Teams bring the right information at everyone’s fingertips
Once integrated, you can search for Salesforce and related contents (documents, conversations…) right from the Microsoft Teams search bar:
Moreover, if you’re using the brand new Bing for Business, it will allow your users to search from enterprise content such as Salesforce accounts, opportunities, people and documents as well as public web results in a single experience.
How to Integrate Microsoft Teams with Salesforce
It is now possible to integrate Microsoft Teams with Salesforce using our SAAS solution, SalesTim for Salesforce.
We design it to empower sales teams to achieve more:
- Collaborate across boundaries: Bring Salesforce CRM records into Microsoft Teams to collaborate and close more deals
- Reduce your Salesforce licensing burden: Work together with customers and any colleague across functions, even if they aren’t a Salesforce user
- Improve your sales process: Don’t reinvent the wheel! With SalesTim for Salesforce, you can easily map your existing sales organization and processes with Microsoft Teams.
- Unify document management: Bring the power of Office 365 files management to Salesforce : Office and Office Online, real time co-authoring, editing on the go
If you’re interested in learning more about SalesTim for Salesforce, just contact us to schedule a live demo:
Further reading
If you’re interested in understanding the publicly released black hole picture, Veritasium has made a fantastic video that delves into the details…